Anthropological Theory recent issues

What makes a man? Rereading Naven and The Gender of the Gift, 2004

Lipset, D. — 2008-07-25

In this essay, I argue that the concept of masculinity that was first developed in Bateson's Naven, his 1936 monograph about ritual and society among the Iatmul, a New Guinea people, was an originary moment for the constructivist position that has come to hold sway, not only over masculinity studies in Melanesia in specific, but over masculinity studies in general. My thesis, however, advances a more definite claim: Bateson's prescient view of gender did not come to theoretical maturity in masculinity studies, either areally, or more broadly defined, for another 50 years, when it was given new articulation by Marilyn Strathern in The Gender of the Gift (1988). In order to make the connection I see between these two books, I first reread Bateson's argument in Naven with regard to its view of Iatmul masculinity. I then turn to Marilyn Strathern's conception of gender in Melanesia, again with an emphasis on masculinity. After discussing my claim that the one gave rise to important dimensions of the other, I conclude by briefly defending that assertion against a methodological challenge, that of Whig interpretation, which is inevitably raised against this kind of intellectual history.

Totalization and detotalization: Alternatives to hierarchy and individualism

Rio, K. M., Smedal, O. H. — 2008-07-25

This article marks an effort to extend Louis Dumont's concept pair of hierarchy and individualism towards a more realistic understanding of social formations. Dumont's work is reviewed along with his critics, and through a survey of contemporary ethnography a move towards a concept of totalization is suggested. It is argued that a view of totalization and detotalization provides a vocabulary for a re-establishment of the social for the discipline of anthropology.

Hacker practice: Moral genres and the cultural articulation of liberalism

Coleman, E. G., Golub, A. — 2008-07-25

Past literature tends towards dichotomous representations of computer hackers as either unhealthy young men engaged in bold tournaments of sinister hacking or visionaries whose utopian technological lifestyle has the potential to disrupt the pathologies of capitalism and modernity more generally. In contrast, this article examines the heterogeneous nature of hacker sociality in order to more adequately portray the complex topography of hacker morality and liberalism. We distinguish between and compare three different, though overlapping, moral expressions of hacking in order to theorize liberalism not as it is traditionally framed — as a coherent body of philosophical, economic, and legal thought or a set of normative precepts and doctrines — but as a cultural sensibility that, in practice, is under constant negotiation and reformulation and replete with points of contention. In doing so, we seek to contribute not only to the ethnographic literature on hacking, but to wider theoretical issues regarding the relationship of culture, morality, liberalism and technology in the contemporary world.

Audit culture and Illiberal governance: Universities and the politics of accountability

Shore, C. — 2008-07-25

The economic imperatives of neoliberalism combined with the technologies of New Public Management have wrought profound changes in the organization of the workplace in many contemporary capitalist societies. Calculative practices including `performance indicators' and `benchmarking' are increasingly being used to measure and reform public sector organizations and improve the productivity and conduct of individuals across a range of professions. These processes have resulted in the development of an increasingly pervasive `audit culture', one that derives its legitimacy from its claims to enhance transparency and accountability. Drawing on examples from the UK, particularly the post-1990s' reform of universities, this article sets out to analyse the origins and spread of that audit culture and to theorize its implications for the construction of academic subjectivities. The questions I ask are: How are these technologies of audit refashioning the working environment and what effects do they have on behaviour (and subjectivity) of academics? What does the analysis of the rise of managerialism tell us about wider historical processes of power and change in our society? And why are academics seemingly so complicit in, and unable to challenge, these audit processes?

Embodiment, emotion and empathy: A phenomenological approach to apprenticeship learning

Gieser, T. — 2008-07-25

In The Perception of the Environment (2000), Ingold has argued that differences in cultural knowledge are more a matter of variation in embodied skills than in discursive knowledge. These skills develop through the practitioners' engagement with their environment and in situated social relationships. In order to `discover' for themselves what is taken for granted for experienced practitioners, they have to `fine-tune' their perception through observation and imitation. But how do observations and imitations of others' movements actually transfer into shifts in one's own perception? In her book Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion (2002), Milton argued that emotion acts as a learning mechanism to filter attention. I propose that when one observes and imitates in a process of learning, one enters into an empathic relationship with a skilled practitioner. Through synchronization of intentions and movements, emotions spread over and change the practitioners' perception accordingly.

Interview with Marshall Sahlins

2008-07-25

Buses in Bongoland: Seductive analytics and the occult

Sanders, T. — 2008-05-29

It is now common for anthropologists to argue that the occult is adequately explained as an oblique, metaphysical critique of the now, the new, the neoliberal. Indeed, such understandings have come to form a deep-seated anthropological analytic. Yet while this analytic has proved productive, the explanations it invites often hinge more on theoretical expectation than empirical demonstration. This may disable the very politics and ethics anthropologists seek to engage, insofar as it renders redundant the real-world inequalities and forms of exploitation they seek to understand. This article considers this analytic in relation to Tanzanian buses and the devils alleged to inhabit them. To re-engage anthropology's critical politics and ethics, the article suggests that anthropologists pay sustained attention to historical processes, particularly, continuities. This requires we reconfigure some longstanding theoretical frameworks, lexicons, explanations and pre-theoretical commitments. The article concludes by providing some conceptual signposts to re-orientate projects on the occult.

Value and virtue

Lambek, M. — 2008-05-29

This article offers suggestions for situating value in the liberal economic sense with respect to values understood in a broader, ethical sense. It is a conceptual exercise in bringing together ideas about value, which pertain largely to objects, with ethical ideas of virtue, which concern acts and character. I argue that economic value and ethical value are incommensurable insofar as the former deals with ostensibly relative, commensurable values and the latter with ostensibly absolute and incommensurable ones. The articulation of incommensurable values is better expressed as acts or practices of judgment rather than of choice. I suggest that sacrifice may be a site where meta-value is established.

Devoted to development: Moral progress, ethical work, and divine favor in south India

Pandian, A. — 2008-05-29

The article presents rural citizens in postcolonial India as subjects of development: individuals who must submit themselves to an order of power identifying their own nature as a problem, and demanding that they work to develop themselves in order to overcome the limits of this nature. I discuss three dimensions of such subjection to development: development as a normative order of moral imperatives, as a domain of ethical engagement with oneself, and as a relation to others — state officials, teachers, missionaries, and even deities — with whom the ultimate responsibility for one's progress is invested. Focusing on the colonial experience and postcolonial condition of a particular south Indian community classified as a `criminal tribe' in the early 20th century, I confront toil as virtue with toil as fate, juxtaposing the moral horizons of state intervention with the cosmological orientations of ordinary cultivators.

Misplaced masculinities: Status loss and the location of gendered subjectivities amongst `non-transnational' Bosnian refugees

Jansen, S. — 2008-05-29

In order to understand gendered patterns of coping that have been noted amongst a variety of migrants, this article analyses localized trajectories of subjectivity that structure early coping strategies with downward social mobility amongst a section of refugees from the Bosnian 1992—5 war. In particular, it investigates the `misplacement' — as refugee men and as Bosnian men — experienced by middle-aged, professional, educated fathers who had fled Bosnian towns. These men tended to stubbornly cling to their remembered personhood, located there where they recalled having counted as someone. Yet they were disengaged from `transnational' social fields, for the place where they recalled having counted as someone was not present-day Bosnia-Herzegovina, but previous forms of organized sociality in that same geographical location. The article draws attention to the specific interplay of general experiences of migration to western states in the 1990s, `ethnic cleansing' and refugee policies, and specific remembered localized life-trajectories in the Socialist Yugoslav Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina and their sudden end.

Fire and identity as matters of concern in Corsica

Candea, M. — 2008-05-29

This article connects the recent anthropological interest in human/non-human assemblages with one of the hoariest problems to haunt anthropologists of identity and nationalism: the question of the link between people and land. Drawing on elements of a Latourian `sociology of associations' and on theories of distributed cognition, the article unpacks divergent ways of watching forest fires on the French island of Corsica. In Corsica, fires are often treated as revelatory of the real differences between insiders who love the land and outsiders who merely `visit'. The article argues that unpacking the multiple connections between people and things which are made and remade in the process of watching fires can get us beyond the classic anthropological analysis of such claims as `rhetorical', `metaphorical' or `imaginative', without however falling into the trap of radical alterity — a false alternative which has too often dogged the anthropological study of identity.

Introduction: Toward a value theory of anthropology

Pedersen, D. — 2008-02-28

Commodities, brands, love and kula: Comparative notes on value creation In honor of Nancy Munn

Foster, R. J. — 2008-02-28

Can Marcel Mauss's insights into the relations between persons and things help make sense of the nature of branded commodities and the operation of long distance commodity chains? Can these insights, when coupled with Marxist critiques of fetishism and labor exploitation, underwrite a politics of value that mobilizes the practices of knowing consumers? This article reconsiders gift giving in order to understand how brands operate as media of exchange between companies and consumers. It compares the rhetoric of brand stewardship in current business literature with Nancy Munn's account of the exchange of Gawan canoes for kitomu, a category of kula shells over which owners exercise proprietary rights. In so doing, the article develops a framework for comparing processes of value creation and circulation that substitutes a series of partial analogues for a monolithic opposition between gifts and commodities. It concludes by taking up the question of a politics of ethical consumption, and the crucial role of knowledge in such a politics.

Market, materiality and moral metalanguage

Keane, W. — 2008-02-28

Accounts of the social transformations wrought by capitalism commonly draw on assumptions about the abstraction taken to be inherent to money and markets. This article raises questions about some of the presupposed features of abstraction. It argues that economic transactions, like any social interaction, require semiotic mediation. Moreover, insofar as markets necessarily involve economic ideologies held by their participants, they cannot be wholly free of some kinds of moral claims. Since those moral claims are reproduced in the semiotic forms that transactions take, markets cannot achieve full social disembedding, at least in the most radical sense. This may be true not just of simple marketplaces but the more recent, supposedly decontextualized and abstract economic forms. The semiotic mediation of markets should enter into any political or moral understanding of their workings, insofar as signifying practices are inherently material, and thus inseparable from causalities and the power-laden contexts they mediate. The resemblance between ideologies of money and of the sign as modes of radical abstraction is not accidental, since both are products of ideological depictions of `modernity' as a dematerialization of the world.

Marxian value theory: An anthropological perspective

Turner, T. — 2008-02-28

Marx's critique of political economy and analysis of the capitalist mode of production are grounded in more general ideas about human activity and social organization that, taken together, constitute an anthropology which is applicable in principle to all social systems and forms of social production, including those that do not involve the production and exchange of commodities. Marx's anthropology is built upon general notions of production, need, value, semiotic mediation, exploitation, alienation, the role of subjective activity and consciousness, and the structural properties of systems of social production as totalities. This article attempts to abstract the general forms and principles of these notions in terms applicable to non-commodity producing social systems. It identifies Marx's formulation of value theory as the most encompassing organizational framework of his anthropological ideas.

Brief event: The value of getting to value in the era of `globalization'

Pedersen, D. — 2008-02-28

This article explores the challenge of how to make sense of ethnographic moments, which are saturated with qualities of immediacy, abruptness, and the faltering of subjective expectations. It approaches the problem through the theoretical lens of nominalism versus realism and, drawing on Marx's inquiries into value formation and Peirce's semiotic logic, develops an approach predicated on discerning a three-way recursively embedded relationship among `the potential', `the actual' and `the general'. The article argues that such a modality — a `realist semiotic of value' — illuminates a great deal more than is otherwise visible and does so in a way that has important political and ethical implications for the subjects involved.

Beyond the object: Of rabbits, rutabagas and history

Eiss, P. K. — 2008-02-28

This article takes Raymond Williams' discussion of the `laborer's supper' as an entrée to an exploration of what `value' and `history' might mean, and especially, what the relations between the two might be. My purpose is neither to arrive at definitions of `value' or `history', nor to elaborate a general theory defining their nature or interrelation. Rather, it is to consider the presence of history, and in many cases, the implications of its absence or containment, in both structural and object-centered anthropological analyses of value. I take the `laborer's supper' as a challenge to consider the implications and possibilities of bringing the two concepts into a more explicit and dynamic relationship with each other, thus moving from the anthropology of value to something that might be called the anthropology and history of value.

Book review: David Graeber. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. pp. 105. ISBN: (pbk) 0 97 28196 4 9. Price: $10.00

Pfahlert, J. — 2008-02-28

The repugnant cultural other speaks back: Christian identity as ethnographic `standpoint'

Howell, B. M. — 2007-11-05

Looking at Christian identity in terms of standpoint theory, this article takes up the argument introduced by Susan Friend Harding more than 10 years ago that Christianity and Christians are stigmatized within anthropology as a `repugnant cultural other'. Drawing from my own fieldwork in the Philippines and other recent work on Christianity, I argue that Christianity is a subject position analogous to other committed subject positions outside androcentric, enlightenment modernity (e.g. feminism). As such, the Christian voice should be welcomed and encouraged in the academy as a valuable ethnographic perspective.

The incest taboo?: A reconsideration of Westermarck

Leavitt, G. C. — 2007-11-05

The ongoing discussion between social scientists who espouse some variety of socio-environmental theory (for examples see Leavitt, Incest and Inbreeding Avoidance: A Critique of Darwinian Social Science, 2005: 215 and Leavitt, `Disappearance of the Incest Taboo', American Anthropologist, 1989) and those who advance Darwinian selection principles (human sociobiology, Darwinian social science, behavioral genetics, or evolutionary psychology) have often focused their debate on the incest taboo and the avoidance of inbreeding. Acknowledged by many as an important cultural universal, the incest taboo has commonly been recognized by Darwinian social scientists as the most compelling instance supporting the premise that complex human behaviors can result from natural selection. Human sociobiology forwards the argument that natural selection mechanisms will favor outbreeding because inbreeding is deleterious. By contrast, socio-environmentalists have made the case that the incest taboo is a socioculturally derived solution to important practical problems found in human social life. In this article, I not only challenge the commonly held notion that inbreeding is injurious, but also argue that inbreeding is often harmless and even fitness-enhancing. If so, Westermarck's hypothesis that children raised together naturally trigger selection mechanisms for sexual avoidance is highly questionable. Rather, incest and inbreeding avoidance are diverse practices related to environmental circumstances.

Shock and subjectivity in the age of globalization: Marginalization, exclusion, and the problem of resistance

Friedman, J. R. — 2007-11-05

This article considers the nature of `shock' as both an experiential category and as a strategy used in the processes of globalization. I examine the trope of shock in the lives of coal miners in Romania's Jiu Valley region. The argument contrasts two definitions of shock — the `mimetic' view and the `productive' view (the latter embodied in Ferenczi's notion of Erschütterung) — and shows that, while the strategic goals of globalizing economic institutions (IMF, World Bank) and empire-building states strive for a `productive' shock, what global processes tend to produce in communities marginalized from global flows is a `mimetic' shock and a `shocked subjectivity'.

Denying the gift: Aspects of ceremonial exchange and sacrifice on Ambrym Island, Vanuatu

Rio, K. — 2007-11-05

This article takes up the well-known `obligation of a return' suggested by Marcel Mauss. Through material from Ambrym Island, Vanuatu, Central Melanesia, we get a view of how the ceremonial process, and the sacrifice of pigs especially, builds on a distinction between `giving' and `exchanging'. Supported by the phenomenological approach taken by Derrida on the gift as well as recent ethnographies parallel to the Ambrym case, the argument is that this very opposition is the driving force of the ceremonial process. It is argued that the sacrifice of pigs is about transforming gifts into reciprocity and thus the creation of autonomous persons.

Actor-network theory and anthropology after science, technology, and society

Oppenheim, R. — 2007-11-05

This essay makes a case for the value of actor-network theory (ANT) to anthropology beyond its most usual deployment in studies of science, technology, and society (STS). Through a review of two recent ANT works against both the longer-term development of the approach and common patterns of anthropological appropriation and critique over the past several years, it argues that `about-ANT' and `across-ANT' understandings that emphasize an applicability to technoscience or situations of hybridity should give way to `among-ANT' readings that highlight its quality as a domain-independent ontology of association. Most centrally, it offers a reading of the constitutive spatialities of ANT itself and of spatiality as an important ANT concern, with the suggestion that a greater appreciation for this dimension of the literature might form the basis of broader and more varied anthropological engagements.

Book reviews

Rajagopalan, K., Hamilton, C., Quintais, L. — 2007-11-05